The essence of professional services consulting is to assist clients with business and/or technology initiatives. Assistance is often provided in the form of advice, meeting or session leadership and participation and through the completion of work products or deliverables that are deemed necessary during the course of the engagement. A consultant's role is to listen, brainstorm, and help the client think through issues by analyzing problems, offering corrective solutions and completing assigned work.
Consulting is available today in many flavors. Services may be brokered by large international blue chip firms, mid market organizations, small business entities and independent consultants. While the size of the professional services firm may vary, sales and delivery methods are normally the same. Sales cycles are often very long, firms are dependent on credit receivables, service prices are typically very expensive and delivery is more than likely non standard, unpredictable and premise based.
Today, business is radically different from what existed only a few years ago. Adapting to rapid change is a constant challenge in every organization, market and industry-even more so in the business and technical professional services consulting world. Although spearheading, organizing and facilitating change for many new economy clients-many professional services consulting companies still operate using out dated sales and delivery methods.
In order to survive in today's fast paced ‘on demand’ economy, consulting firms, also known as Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), must transform their businesses from the traditional PSO model to a worldwide services model that delivers strategically streamlined services in a real time, standardized, more cost efficient, and geographically agnostic manner.
As adoption of on demand software technology (Software as a Service) gains favor within the business and technology community, it simply makes sense for professional services firms to adopt a virtual framework for Just-In-Time (JIT) consulting. To date, a JIT services model within the professional services industry hasn't existed. The advent of this invention; coupled with call center, telecommunications, Internet and many ancillary next generation technologies, solves this need.